Not to be outdone by the special interest groups and their pretentious little dictionaries of coined terms that they would be delighted if the rest of the world adopted (see the various answers below), I hereby propose: depletives, a portmanteau of deleted expletives.
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KazOct 15 '12 at 7:09

8

Ah, maledicta. That brings me way back. When I graduated from high school, I was the maledictorian. :)
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KazOct 15 '12 at 7:10

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Another proposition: these are not exactly dirty words, but usually the order of the characters depends on a particular keyboard layout, hence we might call them qwerty words.
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KazOct 15 '12 at 7:13

Grawlix won't work. Just Google it and you'll see why. Profanitype works but sounds and looks too much like stereotype, even though "-type" is supposed to relate to typewriting. Zairja has the answer(s): Bleep is not a name for !@#$%^&* but rather a spoken equivalent of it, as is blankety-blank (my substantive contribution to this thread). The winner, so far: Obscenicon. (Good going, Zairja!)
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H Stephen StraightOct 17 '12 at 0:04

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@HStephenStraight Can you elaborate on why Grawlix won't work? I didn't find any google hit that did not confirm this. Although the meaning of Obscenicon is probably easier to guess without prior knowledge...
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Tobias KienzlerOct 20 '12 at 12:34

So people came up with a small set of conventional euphemistic readings for <expletive suppressed>: "bleep", "bleeping", "bleepity-bleep", "blankety-blank", and so on. Of these, "bleep" seems to have pretty much won out, as (again) Geoff noted in his first posting. And, indeed, the IMDB lists the movie What the #$! Do We Know!?* as What the Bleep Do We Know!? So there now is a conventional way for pronouncing the name of the movie.

I've always known it as symbolic substitution — but have no idea where I learned the phrase. Interestingly enough, the English language contains more descriptive words than any other language — completely negating the need for symbolic substitution in the first place.

Another word I've seen used for it is symtax, but I prefer symbolic substitution because it is self explanatory by definition.

Comics artists sometimes call them grawlixes and sometimes "swear symbols". Their use is referred to as "symbol swearing".

The closest way to duplicate their effect in speech is to bleep (electronically if you've the means, or just making a bleep dound), since such bleeps serve the same purpose with audible speech in television or radio, as they do in print.